


Fire Away

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Angst, Community: sentinel_thurs, Episode Related, Episode: s01e05 Cypher, Gunplay, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-03
Updated: 2011-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-15 08:45:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few days after Blair is nearly killed by David Lash, he's working out his feelings his own way.  Please note, this story features sexual gun play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire Away

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story for the Sentinel Thursday comm, to the prompt 'fire'.

Jim's sleep was restless, filled with uncomfortable dreams and intermittent waking, and at first he thought the soft footsteps climbing the stairs were simply another dream. The sounds were barely there - a creak of the second riser, the nearly inaudible scuff of callused skin on waxed and varnished wood, the whisper of cloth rubbing against the brick of the wall. But by the time Blair reached the top of the steps, Jim knew he was awake.

"Sandburg?" he murmured, his voice rough with weariness.

Blair started like Jim had leaped at him and yelled 'boo!'. "Oh, hey, man!" he gasped. "Don't do that to me."

Jim struggled up to sit in the bed, poised between concern and considerable irritation. "Don't do what? Don't ask why the hell you're creeping up my stairs at - shit, Chief, 3.22 am?"

Blair's eyes were huge, which was no surprise because Jim's bedroom was unlit except for the bleed of light from the lamp on the downstairs coffee table. Blair must have turned it on before he made his way up the stairs.

"Sorry, Jim. Sorry, sorry." Blair hands covered his face. "Sorry. I'm weird, what I mean - I'm in a weird mood, I had a bad dream...." He stopped. "I'll just go back downstairs. Sorry." He turned away.

Jim snapped on his lamp. He was properly awake and there might as well be some light cast somewhere. "Whoa, there, little doggie. What the hell is going on here?" He registered the meaning of at least part of Blair's incoherency. "Bad dream?" He rose from the bed and approached Blair, who stood frozen at the top of the stairs before he apparently shook off indecision and took the first step downwards, only to be brought up short by Jim's hand around his arm. Blair was just in shorts and a t-shirt, and Jim's palm spread across the boundary between cloth and skin. Blair was cold.

"You want to talk? Is that why you came up here?"

Blair shook his head. "I was half asleep, and confused." He cocked his head and tried to turn on a smile. "Nothing to see here, man. Move along. Or I will, if I get the chance." His eyes flicked between Jim's hand around his arm, and Jim's face. Jim studied him for a moment, and then he listened, and he felt. Blair's heart was racing. His skin was surface cold, but Blair wasn't truly chilled. Jim guessed that meant that the small tremors that shivered through Blair's muscles were shock or anxiety.

He hauled Blair off the step onto the floor of his room and pushed him to sit on the bed. There was a spare blanket in his closet, army grey and plain, and he grabbed it and opened it and draped it over his friend's shoulders.

"There," he said. "Now talk."

"Is that an order, officer?" Blair said sourly.

"I'm not the guy who tried sneaking into someone's bedroom in the middle of the night. Talk." His words might have been uncompromising, but Jim's tone was gentle. Blair looked seriously spooked, despite his sarcasm.

Blair huddled into the blanket, like a kid at a campout, only he was no kid. Jim was suddenly aware of Blair's maturity, of Blair's masculinity, of the stubble that sprang from a firm, heavy jaw, and of the breadth of the hands that clasped the blanket.

"It won't stop," Blair said distractedly, his head bowed. "I'll drop off, and then I'm in that fucking _vile_ chair and I hear the shots." His face sharpened, along with his tones, and he lifted his head to look Jim in the face. "I counted. Not just in my dreams. Then, back then when it was real. One. Two. Three. Four. Five." A dull flush suffused his skin. "I didn't want to see you, Jim. I wanted to see your gun. Because I'm a weird asshole who wasn't actually quite awake when I made a decision, and now that I'm sufficiently humiliated I'd just like to go back to bed."

Jim stared, unsure and embarrassed. "Chief. It's normal for things to be kind of weird right now. You know that, right?"

Blair lifted a hand to rub at his face, and then pushed his hair back. "Yeah. I know that." His skin had a glow to it in the subdued light - or maybe what Jim saw was the glow of life, of animation and spirit. Blair Sandburg sat on Jim's bed, wrapped in a blanket and entirely alive, instead of laid out in a mortuary drawer, his pasty skin drably bruised with post-mortem lividity.

"You want to see my weapon?" Jim said, and without waiting for a reply went to the drawer where he kept it. He picked it up, looking at it as if it was brand new and strange to him. It rested, heavy and smooth, in his hand. Blair twisted to follow his movement and when Jim returned he sat on the further side of the bed, cross-legged. Blair turned and settled himself towards the middle of the mattress, also cross-legged. They faced each other, and Jim laid his gun down on the bed between them.

"It's a Sig-Sauer P228," he said softly. "Semi-automatic, 9mm. The magazines for this vary from ten to thirteen round capacity. Thirteen for law enforcement only." Blair stared intently. "You've seen my weapon before, Chief. Hell, you've handled it."

"Not this one. And that was different."

Jim didn't ask how it was different. "This is how you do a basic field-strip," he said, and took it apart. "See, this catch here releases the magazine..... this one here releases the slide..." His voice droned on, quiet, uninflected, as he took his gun apart and then put it all back together again, and let it lie between them, dark and hard and metallic against the soft organic rumple of the comforter.

"Was the magazine full when you went after him?" Jim was silent, watching Blair, trying to gauge his mood. "Or did you just fire five bullets into him because that was all you had left?"

"It was a full clip."

"So, why five bullets? Was that how many it took before the fucker would lie down and die?" Blair eyes burned with febrile curiosity. "I saw you with Sarris. Just one bullet, and she tried to kill way more people than Lash."

Jim paused, unsure of how to answer the question. At first, taking Lash down had been a fight within Jim's usual experience, but the more that they'd struggled, the more that Lash would not stay _down_ , the more that Jim had felt like he'd discovered a spectacularly repulsive insect crawling on his skin. When he was a child, he'd flicked a spider away with a cry of disgust, and frantically flailed at it with a cherished book until it had been mashed and unrecognisable. That was the impulse that drove Jim to pull the trigger five times, until Lash finally stopped coming, and fell. Jim had looked down at the staring, vacant corpse and felt irrationally guilty, as if he'd harmed an idiot child.

"It took what it took," he said eventually. Blair didn't need the details. He had details enough of his own boiling in his skull.

"Okay," Blair said, his mouth curving in a sly, conspiratorial smile. "So, who are _you_ talking to?"

"I'm a trained professional," Jim said with deadpan ease.

"Huh." Blair reached for the gun lying on the comforter. "May I?" His index finger ran gently down the length of the barrel, and something twitched along Jim's skin.

"May you what?"

"See if I paid attention to your weapons 101 class, doofus." Blair shucked off the blanket and picked up the gun, and Jim, with great care, gently laid his hand on Blair's and shifted it so that the barrel pointed away from them both.

"I think that you're maybe still too out of it for safety. How about you go back to bed."

Blair shook his head. "Look," he said, his fingers moving with deft care, "I've taken the bullets out. Happy now?"

"Your hands are fine. It's your headspace I'm worried about."

"That's nothing new. You're always worried about my headspace. Wondering about it, anyway." Blair continued to strip the gun, slowly but correctly. Blair picked things up quickly, Jim knew that, and he watched in silence, aware of how still Blair was aside from the movement of his hands, almost as if he was meditating.

"I wonder why Lash didn't use a gun," Blair said.

Jim shrugged. "Who knows why crazies do the things they do."

"I guess he figured he didn't need one because he was legion. Little Davey and his friends." Blair laughed, a low, ugly sound. "God, he was strong." He began to put the gun back together again

"Yeah. He was." Jim's bruises and the damage in the room below were testament enough to that. "It's not your fault.... It doesn't make you some wiener that he took you down."

"I know," Blair said, and pushed the clip in. He laughed again, a noise that sent a prickle up Jim's spine. Blair sounded almost like he was high, and on the very edge of control. "Hey. Who'd have thought it? Blair Sandburg in some guy's bed in the middle of the night, handling his piece?"

"That's what I like about you, Sandburg. That mature, sophisticated sense of humour." Jim summoned his calm voice without even thinking about it, the voice that he used on sweaty perps who held guns in their hands, the one that he used on people who were unpredictable, who might do absolutely anything.

"There's a lot of symbolism attached to weapons. A lot of - metaphors." Blair's voice dropped deep on that last word, as he gripped the gun in his right hand and stroked the barrel gently across the back of his hand. "Extensions of us. Tools."

Jim stared. What Blair was doing was dangerous, was perilous in so many ways, but Jim sat still, a snake watching the snake charmer, listening to the flute-playing wind its way inside his head.

"Does that mean that you're touching me right now?" Blair asked, and Jim's gut flipped. Don't test me, he thought. Don't fucking push this, don't push me.

"Sandburg, if you're in some weird kinky mood, that's fine, but take the goddamn clip out."

The gun skimmed up Blair's arm. "No way, man. A gun that's not armed is impotent." Blair smirked. "If you know what I mean."

Jim had glimmerings, but the shift of metal over skin was driving him quietly frantic. "It's not safe, Chief," he said.

Blair looked him in the eye, flushed and brazen, and Jim didn't have to drop his gaze to know that Blair was hard. Arousal and sex had scents that no-one needed freaky senses to discern. "I know," Blair said, and Jim shut his eyes, and tried to deal with no more than the simple, surface layer of meaning in the quiet words. Then he rose up from his cross-legged sit, and knelt in front of Blair, and put one hand on his wrist. The gun lay against Blair's sternum, and continued a seemingly inexorable path downwards, with Jim unwilling to fight too much against the drop until Blair at least took his finger from out of the trigger guard.

The gun rested sideways against Blair's gut. Jim's knuckles rested against taut muscles. The summit of Blair's erection, barely capped by the fabric of his shorts, nudged against the edge of Jim's hand, together with the brush of Blair's fingers, pressed against himself. "You killed him with this," Blair whispered.

"Yes, yes, I did." It was a whisper too, a hushed, hidden sound. Jim cleared his throat. "Give me the gun, Blair."

It was a long wait, before the muscles in Blair's wrist loosened and the gun sagged in his grip. Jim neatly slid his hand from Blair's skin to the gun and gently pulled it away from between them. Blair made a noise that might have been a sob, and the hand that had held on so tenaciously to cold metal lifted to hold hard at the juncture of Jim's neck and shoulder. Blair's hand at his groin shifted and rubbed only a few times - one, two, three, four, five, Jim thought nonsensically - before Blair pressed hard, curling in on himself as far as the block of Jim's body would permit. He'd come, but there didn't seem to be any ease in it for him.

"He's dead, and I'm alive."

"Yeah, that's right," Jim said. He was half-hard and hideously confused; and way too much of his confusion arose from the knowledge that he'd have been more than half-hard if he hadn't been trying to manoeuvre his pistol away from two vulnerable bodies. He hooked his free arm around Blair, and bent awkwardly sideways to put the gun down.

"I don't know why I did that. God, I am so crazy right now." Blair's voice was rife with mortification and uncertainty, but the hand gripping Jim's shoulder stayed put.

"No," Jim said hoarsely. "You're not crazy. He was fucking crazy."

"There are degrees of this thing, you know," Blair declared, suddenly the didactic professor.

"Maybe there are. But you look pretty sane to me."

Blair gently shoved Jim back. "I'm a crazy sane man who seriously needs a pair of clean shorts." He pushed himself to the edge of the bed. "I.... God, I can't believe that you let me do that."

That stung. "Let you? You want to tell me how I could have stopped you?"

Blair spread his hands in exasperated frustration. "I didn't mean.... You could have stopped me with one good punch, and there's plenty of men who would have. Fuck." Blair appeared to reconsider 'fuck' as an expression. "Shit." He stared at Jim, who still sat on his heels in the middle of his bed. "We never speak of this again. Okay?"

Jim nodded but he wondered if he was just humouring Blair's current mood. Normally, Blair Sandburg never gave up gnawing at a conundrum until the flesh was stripped, the bone cracked, and the marrow sucked dry, and Jim found it hard to believe that the same wouldn't apply to this as to everything else. Maybe not tomorrow, or anytime soon, but Jim was surprisingly sure that one day something would bubble up out of Blair's ever curious mind. Blair would have figured out the answers to do with him and he'd demand the answers to do with James Ellison. Jim just hoped that he had either some answers or at least some convincing lies.

"Go to bed, Chief. Try to sleep."

Blair nodded, but there was something in his face, a deep confusion and surprise that was nothing to do with his own actions. He walked down the stairs with slow, careful steps, and Jim got off the bed and picked up his gun and put it away out of sight. He straightened the bed before he got into it - squared the comforter and put away the blanket he'd brought out for Blair. It was barely a quarter of four.

All the important moments passed in no time at all. Jim always had known that.


End file.
